Summer School: Social cohesion in a transregional and global perspective

The German neologism “gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt”, which only poorly translates into the well-established academic category “social cohesion”, has become increasingly popular and adopted as a term since about 2013 and has seen a rise in use in political terminology since the so-called refugee crisis. While it is already interesting to follow the sociolinguistic development of the term, it is even more interesting to see which topics are addressed in the debate: some of them are classics of societal analysis – such as questions of social inequality, cultural recognition, or class and milieu building – and others are relatively new like the growing criticism towards a certain interpretation of globalization. The debate can be taken as an indicator of tectonic rearrangements within societies and in the world order. The more recent crisis related to the worldwide spread of the virus that can cause COVID-19, on the one hand, has somehow changed the focus of the previous debate (where right-wing populism was very much at the centre) and, on the other hand, relates explicitly to the former fear of a loss of social cohesion.

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